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2009 summary https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp > The failure of this chip to do anythin
by chx 3y ago
2009 summary https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp
> The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel—and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.
> It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.
- cubefox 3y agoThis piece sounds like a lot of misrepresentation and exaggeration.
- chx 3y agoWhether the DEC Alpha development stopped because of Merced (as it was called then) or because of the 1997 legal mess https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-dispute/ https://www.wired.com/1997/10/intel-dec-settle-alpha-chip-di... is quite hard to say. The DEC Alpha architecture was planned for 25 years and it certainly was not technical barriers that killed the Alpha 21464.
- jabl 3y agoIn the end it was market forces that did it in. Making new chips was (still is!) exponentially more expensive for each generation, and at the same time mass market chips were getting better and better while they could amortize the NRE costs over zillions of chips sold, eating the market from below. And other RISC competitors (and IA-64) were attacking from the sides. DEC just didn't have the customer base or depth of pockets to fund Alpha development. That it was Itanium that ultimately delivered the coup de grace was but the final insult.
- FullyFunctional 3y agoIn my limited understanding two factors contributed significantly to Alpha failing. Business-wise, DEC and Ken Olesen were stuck in an old minicomputer mentality and wasn't sufficiently able or willing to "let it loose" and let it take over the market with DEC as the CPU supplier. Technically, Alpha development was taking longer and longer and the schedule slips got worse and worse.
- kstrauser 3y agoIf the business end had kept the cash rolling in, do you think the technical side could have kept to schedule?
- GrilledChips 3y agoIt wasn't the technical side that caused the schedule slips. It was constant competition with other aspects of the business, especially the VAX lineup. The VAX 9000 in particular was a $3 billion money pit that didn't make back even 25% of it's development costs and was repeatedly chosen over development of prism and later alpha. Even when it came down to the embarrassingly fast NVAX chip vs the even faster Alhpa, DEC still couldn't get the story straight and lost valuable VAX customers when they could have offered a faster VAX and an upgrade path to Alpha.
- chasil 3y agoI worked on a DECStation 5000/240 running Ultrix, in a student job in 1993. DEC should have bought MIPS, and ported VMS to it. Had they made that decision, they might still exist.
- speed_spread 3y agoYeah, DEC needed to scale the Alpha down, even below PCs. A console deal could have given it a few more years and helped with chip economics.
- javitron 3y ago
- javitron 3y agoIt is a great representation of the average article written about Itanium. I think the register made most of its revenue from articles about Itanium, where the authors had no clue about what they were talking about. Not defending Itanium. But the average article on computer architecture has been garbage for decades now, it's fascinating.
- vGPU 3y agoThis reads like it was written by a discount version of chatGPT.